Posted on 12/04/2005 5:04:42 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The Indian government has begun a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highways, with the first leg, budgeted at $6.25 billion, to be largely complete by next year. It amounts to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the British building of the subcontinent's railway network the century before.
The effort echoes the United States' construction of its national highway system in the 1920's and 1950's. The arteries paved across America fueled commerce and development, fed a nation's auto obsession and created suburbs. They also displaced communities and helped sap mass transit and deplete inner cities.
For India, already one of the world's fastest-growing economies and most rapidly evolving societies, the results may be as radical. At its heart, the redone highway is about grafting Western notions of speed and efficiency onto a civilization that has always taken the long view.
Aryan migration, Mogul conquest, British colonialism - all shaped India's civilization over centuries. Now, in a span of less than 15 years, capitalism and globalization have convulsed India at an unprecedented rate of change.
The real start came in 1991, when India began dismantling its state-run economy and opening its markets to foreign imports and investment. While that reform process has been fitful, leaving the country trailing its neighbor and rival, China, India has turned a corner. Its economy grew 6.9 percent in the fiscal year ending in March. India has a new identity, thanks to outsourcing, as back office to the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times - A woman crossing a stretch of India's improved national highway system in a village in the northern state of Rajasthan.
All those new roads, and all those new cars. Guess they won't be changing their mind and joining Kyoto anytime soon.
Good for them. Let their stone-age, backward-ass, terrorism-supporting neighbor to the west rot in hell
Near the end of this long article:
***.............As Ms. Devi was lugging wet concrete into her mud house, Mr. Rao, the project manager, was counting the days until he could take highway, train and plane, and escape for a holiday in America.
He had three daughters living there, one a computer engineer, the other two married to computer engineers. Most of his engineers - almost all, like him, from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh - had relatives in America, too.
If Bihar was enemy territory for the professionals roosting in rugged camps to build India's dream highway, America was the promised land. India's traffic with America has never been higher; sending a child there had become a middle-class "craze," in one engineer's word.
The founding elites of India were British-educated. Today, the ambitious young pursue degrees from Wharton and Stanford, with some 80,000 Indian students in the United States. Two million Indians live there, working as doctors, software engineers, and motel owners along America's highways.
No surprise, then, that America has shaped the ideas of what India's highway can be. Mr. Rao's deputy, B. K. Rami Reddy, also with a daughter in America, was nearly breathless as he described one stretch of finished roadway in southern India: "You really feel like you are in the U.S., it is so nice. When you go on that road, you feel you are somewhere else."
The implicit effort to make India "somewhere else," more like America, more of the first world and less of the third, girds this entire project. With the highway and India's accompanying rise, Mr. Rao predicted that by 2010 or 2020, "Indians may not feel the need to go abroad."
"This highway will really change the face of India," he said. ..............***
Bump to post #4.
This is good to hear. Look's like India is serious about being a first world power. These roads will increase the quality of life for the population of India.
National Network
India, US close to inking high-tech space pact
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE
NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 1 Taking forward the agenda of civilian space cooperation, India and US are looking at soon finalising a technology safeguard agreement (TSA) on cooperation in the sector.
Both sides today agreed on an elaborate action plan. ‘‘Removal of some of the restrictions has made a difference to our trade in high-tech products,’’ Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said today at a joint press interaction with US Under Secretary for Commerce and industry David H McCormick.
The discussions between the two officials came following the industry-to-industry interaction as part of the Indo-US High Technology Cooperation Group here. Emphasis was also laid on expanding cooperation in defence technology. Saran revealed that India had received a draft of the TSA. ‘‘We hope to be able to conclude that very soon,’’ he said.
Saran said all pending issues related to a US payload on Chandrayan, India’s first lunar mission set for launch in 2008, have been resolved.
It was also decided to set up a private sector working group on biotechnology and initiate an Indo-US Nanotechnology Collaborative Programme for long-term basic research and application. New Delhi has also suggested creating a joint fund for R&D in nanotechnology.
McCormick said he was confident that the discussions had provided an ‘‘excellent foundation’’ for moving forward in these critical areas. He said that bilateral trade had increased by about 20 per cent every year since 2002 when the HTCG was formed.
Only 1 per cent of total US exports to India, he said, needed licences; trade in dual-use items currently stands at $300 million.
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=83093
Have mixed feelings about arable land being used for highways. With India's growing population, land is not a dispensable commodity.
Also, the writer got the name of Calcutta wrong - it is Kolkata now.
Anyone from India - are you seeing this roadwork in reality?
Oh yeah, almost on a daily basis. Though roads in Gujarat have always been good and wide, the new "Golden Quadrilateral" and the "North-South" and " East West" corridors aim for wide and smoooth freeway-like roads connecting all corners and metros in the country. Though initially a State Govt. project, the countrys first Expressway NE 1 (about 100 km long) which connects Ahmedabad and Vadodara (Baroda) has cut transit time to just about an hour. It takes more time in the cities to approach the expressway than on the expressway itself. Now there is a plan to extend this to Surat in the next stage and then to Mumbai in the next after that. The Ahmedabad - Mumbai section of National Highway 8 (NH8) is the busiest road in India.
These roads will change the face of India. But sadly, it does not have the same priority under this Govt. that it had under the previous BJP govt.
ping
Thanks.
Interesting that Gujarat, the so-called bastion of "Hindu" zealotory, is making such progress.
"Anyone from India - are you seeing this roadwork in reality?"
I have not seen the Golden Quadrilateral but have seen the Bombay-Pune Express highway and you have to see it to believe it. The Express highway can rival the best in the world. Now it only takes 2 and a half hours to reach Bombay from Pune. They are also building dozens of flyovers all over Mumbai to reduce the traffic.
I have also seen the new second bridge besides the Howdah bridge in Kolkata. Earlier took 2 hours from Howdah to Kolkata, now it takes 20 minutes.
A large percentage of the U.S. highway system was started during Eishower's presidency. He was very impressed with the Germany's Autobahn and other highway systems that were used for the purpose of moving military hardware during the war.
With these roads, how are the rails fairing? I remember the trains from Pune to Mumbai (Sealgarh Express, etc) were always full. The fastest in those days (1980's) took 4 and half hours.
Well now there are several Pune to Mumbai trains. The best and the fastest is Shatabdi Express. Its almost wholly air conditioned.
Gujarats is the only state economy which has been growing at a consistent 15% growth rate for the past 3 years.
The Hindu "zealotry" exists only in the mind of our "secular" parties. Only crooks and tax-evaders oppose the current Govt. And, you may be surprised to know, Modi is more hated by the VHP and Bajrang Dal than by anyone else. So much for his "fundamentalism". Basically he runs a clean and efficient administration, so that the spoils of office are denied to all politicians, whether BJP or Con-gress, which result in so much dissidence against him. And thats why the people vote him into power by landslides, as evidenced in the recent municipal polls here in Ahmedabad, where the RSS and BJP dissidents were campaigning against him and still the congress was swept out by a landslide.
My father, who lives in Vadodara, has met Modi a couple of times and speaks quite highly of him.
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